For its seventh edition, Tekfestival, together with qwatz and the Goethe – Institut Rom, presents a focus on the work of artist and director Harun Farocki.
Born in 1944 in Nový Jicin (now in the Czech Republic), in 1966 Farocki moved to Germany, where he studied at Berlin’s Cinema and Television Academy (DFFB). Known both in the area of visual arts and of independent cinema, Farocki investigates the relationship between what is created and what is immanent, between the material and the spiritual, and offers an interpretation of “time” and mise-en-scene which is among the finest examples of what European cinema has produced in the last fifteen years. His topics include: the narcisism of the media and the production of an alternative reality to that recognizable through experience; the analysis of technology as a system of political, social and belligerant control; wars; resistance towards the system of traditional cinema. In the course of his career, he has directed about 90 movies, which have been shown across the globe.
This selection presents a series of works realized between the late 1980s and the early 1990s, and between 2001 and 2007.
There are eight movies in total (among them, Yella by Christian Petzold, a German director who has been strongly influenced by Farocki’s work), focusing on the following issues: the fall of Ceaucescu, read through the lens of a new form of mediatic historiography; the examination of the terrorist aesthetic; optical simulation, through the use of images of the Second World War, drawn from American archives; the montage of images of prisons and surveillance cameras; new technologies of control, in which the emphasis on the lack of space and time compression functions as a reminder of the forced inactivity of the prison condition; a beautiful revisiting of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory,” the first movie shown by the Lumière Brothers to the public, representing male and female workers coming out of the Lumière factory. Of crucial importance is  Respite , a movie in which Farocki distances himself from the present to reconstruct – in a painful, and in some ways surreal way – the images that were filmed in 1944 in the Nazi transit camp of Westerbock, in Holland. Farucki’s work, which has been awarded at the Locarno Film Festival and promoted at the South Korean Festival of Jeonju, in the “Digital Project 2007,” does not simply represent reality, but it comments on and rewrites the film reel, by emphasizing the crucial points of the narrative, through the use of slow motion, zoom and various forms of repetition. His work is a true punch in the stomach, which leaves the viewer breathless.

May the 12 DEEP PLAY installation to OPIFICIO
20/a Magazzini Generali street - A project of Fondazione Romaeuropa Arte e Cultura.

The Focus on Harun Farocki is realized by Tekfestival, qwatz and the Goethe - Institut Rom.